Wireless service providers are observing an exponential growth in mobile communications due to both an increase in consumer demand and commercial requirements. Moreover, to ensure customer satisfaction, wireless service providers aim to deliver a high quality service at any location to facilitate reliable and efficient mobile communications. To improve wireless coverage and reduce dead zones, wireless service providers can typically add and/or replace front-end equipment to realize effective bandwidth increases. In addition, femtocells-building-based wireless access points interfaced with a wired broadband network, can be deployed to improve indoor wireless coverage, and to offload a mobility radio access network (RAN) operated by the wireless service provider. Improved indoor coverage includes stronger signal and improved reception (e.g., voice, sound, or data), ease of session or call initiation, and session or call retention as well.
Conventional systems utilize radio frequency (RF) propagation tools to predict and select the best possible sites to be added to existing wireless communication networks for improving network coverage. The adequacy of the results depends on RF propagation predictions, which have limited accuracy, especially in dense urban and indoor environments. In addition, the conventional process does not utilize actual usage data and is simply based on predicted data values. Moreover, an error in selecting and/or predicting a cell site that adds coverage value for a wireless service provider can lead to a hasty or uneducated business decision, which in turn can result in a large financial loss and dissatisfied subscribers.